The present disclosure, in some embodiments thereof, relates to methods and systems of communication and, more particularly, but not exclusively, to methods and systems for enabling and enriching communication between television viewers, for example, through the creation of multi participant sessions, interactive content presentation, and video chat.
People socialize within a shared social space. Often this socialization occurs in the context of listening to music, watching a television program, or watching a movie within the home. The fellowship engendered by this experience changes when some of the members of the social group move away or otherwise become remote from the heart of the group.
During the last few years, various developments have been made to provide television (TV) services that socially connect between users that watch a common video content in different location. For example, services have recently been proposed in which users can store, share and discover bookmarks that point to multimedia clips taken from television and other video programming. The bookmarks, which can be created and shared through a user's set top box or other client device, are analogous to web-based social bookmarks that are offered by on-line services such as del.icio.us, for example. Such social TV services allow users to share clips from programs with friends and tag bookmarks for easy access. Users gain information on what friends are interested in and the producers of the tagged or bookmarked programs gain information about their viewers.
Another example is Chatter application program of Splashcast™ and Hulu™ that allows social network users to add comments to video content which is available at Hulu's website. This program allows social network users to comment about a show via micro comments which are synced to a video file or a stream. In this program user micro comments can be seen by future users that will access the video file or stream.
Another solution is described in U.S. Patent Application No. 2007/0280638 that teaches a system (such as an extension to a social television system) that extracts and stores content and/or commentary from an experiential data stream as a presentation for later playback. The presentation can be given to another to share the experience of viewing the experiential data stream with the creator of the presentation. The presentation can be read and processed by any standard playback device (such as a DVD player, an MP3 player, a tape player etc.). The presentation is predefined and constrained to enable it to be used by commonly used playback devices. In the context of a social television system the disclosed technology provides a way for people to interact naturally while watching a TV program and to share their reactions asynchronously, and later obtaining responses in context from people watching at different times.
Interactive television (TV) has already been deployed in various forms. The electronic program guide (EPG) is one example, where the TV viewer is able to use the remote control to control the display of programming information such as TV show start times and duration, as well as brief synopses of TV shows. The viewer can navigate around the EPG, sorting the listings, or selecting a specific show or genre of shows to watch or tune to at a later time.
Another example is the WebTV interactive system produced by Microsoft, wherein web links, information about the show or story, shopping links, and so on are transmitted to the client terminal through the vertical blanking interval of the TV signal. Other examples of interactive TV include television delivered via the internet protocol (IP) to a personal computer (PC), where true interactivity can be provided, but typically only a subset of full interactivity is implemented. For the purposes of this patent application, full interactivity is defined as fully customizable screens and options that are integrated with the original television display, with interactive content being updated on the fly based on viewer preferences, demographics, other similar viewer's interactions, and the programming content being viewed. The user interface for such a fully interactive system should also be completely flexible and customizable.
During the last years various technologies for the reception and transmission of audio-video signals by users at different locations, for communication between people in real-time have been developed.
These technologies have been integrated into various operating systems and browsers for usage on different client terminals, such as cellular phones, tablets, laptops, and Internet Protocol television (IPTV).
For example, U.S. Patent Application Pub. No. 2011/0173300 describes techniques for a protocol that provides for a TV viewing experience with interaction by allowing for social collaboration of non-co-located TV viewers and integrating the TV viewing experience with social networking concepts and interactive multimedia communication. The protocol enables a digital video distribution system (e.g., IPTV) to provide a user with presence, channel, and grouping information regarding other users in the IPTV system and available video content. The protocol also enables users of the IPTV system to interact using real-time and/or non-real time communication.